


The Reasons

by daphnaea



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Episode: s02e12 Resurrection Ship (2), F/M, Kara Thrace is a sekrit nerd, Pilots, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-06
Updated: 2018-07-06
Packaged: 2019-06-05 23:48:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15182006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daphnaea/pseuds/daphnaea
Summary: Sometimes it's not enough to survive.  Sometimes you need a reason.





	The Reasons

**Author's Note:**

> Yep, this is (was) me jumping on the post-Resurrection Ship 2 angst bandwagon.
> 
> Originally posted to Live Journal January 24, 2006.

_“Are you okay?” she asks a second time. He still isn’t even looking at her. There’s another of those too-empty pauses. Fear spools into a cold lump in her stomach before his eyes flicker. “No, not really,” he says, voice thick as if his throat is scraped raw, and the truth of the statement is self-evident, and she can’t help thinking he looks like death, even though there’s color in his face, even though the day has left no marks on his skin. She has a sudden vision of him cold and lifeless on a Raptor floor, blue-lipped, blank-eyed, of the defibrillator paddles and the arc of his back as electricity floods through it. She blinks. Focuses on the subtle rise of his chest. Thinks maybe some of him got left drifting out though space._

His transfer back to _Galactica_ is immediate, and she’s still the _Pegasus_ CAG, even though Taylor’s still there, glaring from the back row every day in her briefings. Fisk doesn’t shake things up too much, but even so there’s an endless list of things to do, things she wishes she could ask Lee how to do, but he has enough on his plate without her burdens and it’s not like there’s time for social visits anyway.

She thinks of him in the downbeats, the quiet moments. She wonders what else she should have said, but she can never make up her mind. She doesn’t do words, not if she can help it. If she were on _Galactica_ , she could watch him, could make him go running in the mornings and haul him to the triad table in the evenings and even let him win. She could make faces at him in the conference room and spill food on him in the mess and sit with him, late at night, when the sound of his breathing across the bunkroom told her he couldn’t sleep. She knows exactly what to do, but all of it involves being there. Stuck on someone else’s ship, she contents herself with asking Dee about his recovery over the comms every time she flies patrol, just so she can hear someone say he’s ok and pretend that she believes it.

_“I let you down,” he says in that fractured voice that sounds like it’s coming from the other side of a wall even though her knee brushes his ribs._

It doesn’t occur to her that he’s avoiding her until she schedules them on CAP together and ends up flying with Hotdog instead. She spends the four hours (shifts are shorter now, with more pilots available) snapping at him and wondering what it is Lee doesn’t want to hear.

She starts the letter to him that night, though it takes the stolen minutes of three days to finish it, to come up with something that (she thinks) doesn’t sound like it took three days to write. She opens with the requisite jokes about her status as CAG ( _guess I’m a bigger dipstick than we thought_ , and _must be a sunny day down in Tartarus_ ) before broaching the subject of him ( _hope that chat of ours was just a really frakking bad day talking_ ), and offering ( _just in case_ ) an extensive list of things to enjoy about being alive ( _7\. The way Tigh’s neck looks after you say something really inappropriate to him… 24. The chance to find out whether there’s actually any bean-related products in what they’re calling ‘coffee’ nowadays…_ ) with just a little bit of emotional blackmail ( _19\. Friends who trust you implicitly, 30. How the air changes when someone you love walks into the room_ ) and flattery ( _10\. Anticipation of calling in favors from the 49,000 odd people who owe you their lives_ and _26\. Being one of the two best pilots left in the known universe_ ) mixed in for good measure. She signs it _Take care, Kara_ and sends it before she can change her mind.

_“I wasn’t there when you needed me,” he tells her, and it doesn’t make sense because she knows what happened, knows the medics took him straight to sickbay. She doesn’t know what to say to absolve him of a sin he didn’t commit. He’s looking up at her from the bottom of a well and she feels like there’s no air in the room, and the last time that happened (your hand on my gun and your bullet my trigger and death everywhere slipping down your throat but so hard to grasp with clumsy wooden fingers) they couldn’t stop laughing. She figures death by asphyxiation is a lot less funny when you’re doing it alone._

It turns out not to matter how long she spent on the stupid thing. He never writes back.

For a week her face burns whenever she thinks about it. _How the air changes?_ Starbuck doesn’t write crap like that. Starbuck doesn’t do letters, and if she does she certainly doesn’t care if they just get thrown away. Starbuck doesn’t do touchy-feely, she doesn’t freak out when a friend has trouble dealing, she doesn’t make other people’s problems her own. Of course, telling herself all that might have helped more if she didn’t spend her days doing entirely un-Starbuck-like things – paperwork and meetings and giving briefings (no cigars now, no sunglasses, no make believe), evenings alone in her private quarters reviewing personnel files of pilots who don’t like or trust her. She can barely remember what being Starbuck feels like.

_“Look,” she says, her own voice shredding a little on the broken glass in his expression, “A close call like that… that would mess with anybody’s head, all right?” because it’s got to be the accident, doesn’t it? That’s got to be what’s torn him up, except it doesn’t quite make sense because he’s had near misses before, she’s hauled him back from that brink herself often enough to know he’s never been like this, afterwards – he’s been shaky and pissed off and euphoric and shell shocked and keyed up but he’s never had this gaping wrongness about him._

Sometimes she wonders who she has to punch to get a nice vacation in the brig, maybe get busted back down to lieutenant. Let Taylor have his job back. Let her go back to shooting Raiders and winning at cards. But Taylor wasn’t a very good CAG and this is war so it doesn’t matter how much she hates being in charge, it just matters how many pilots make it back at the end of the day, how many cylons don’t.

She has a real bed and a private shower and she misses the noise of her squadron keeping her up at night, misses bitching about the hot water running out. She feels a constant heaviness – weights on her shoulders that make it hard to stand up straight, weights on her face that keep her from smiling. She has to keep reminding herself that they won – mission accomplished, fleet momentarily secure, all that. The victory is sour in her mouth and nothing seems to wash the taste away.

_“It turns out I didn’t need you anyway…” Her expression twists for a second as she remembers the long walk to CIC, her palm sweaty on the gun at her waist and a Lee-shaped emptiness behind her back. She’d felt so frakking alone and though it was months into the war she hadn’t killed a human face to face yet (even if she’d killed things that looked human, that bled as pretty as anything) but maybe it was better this way, better that only one of them be dirtied by this. Lee had always been the idealist, had always believed they were part of something noble, had believed in honor and duty. Kara believed in doing what had to be done. She was already stained, one way or the other. She was the girl you could ask to shoot someone in the head. She wouldn’t be the girl who let you down. And she’d walked into that room with her sweaty hands and her trapped eyes and she’d walked out again without another kill on her list but it didn’t make a difference, did it? Because dead is still dead, no matter whose finger pulled the trigger. And now, looking at Lee, she can’t tell if he still believes in anything at all._

When she hears about Lee and Dualla (from Helo – she’s back on _Galactica_ for a meeting, and naturally Lee’s nowhere to be found), her first reaction is relief. She grins and asks for details, and he gives her an odd look and says they were caught necking in a supply closet ( _by Cally, if you can believe it, the kid was searching the ship for caches of that stuff the knuckledraggers use to get grease off_ ). And she laughs because people who want to die don’t go after girls, they don’t make out in storage areas, and when she gets back on the shuttle she feels the smallest bit lighter.

_“Let’s just be glad that we both came back alive, all right?” she says, but her own relief has already evaporated. She’s learned to tell herself that it doesn’t really matter how frakked up things get, as long as they’re still alive then there might be a chance to set things right someday. Therefore life equals hope, she tells herself, and she’s glad she’s not deep enough to worry about whether that syllogism really holds much water._

Her first real friend on the _Pegasus_ is Melissa Grave, a Raptor pilot. Her second is the new XO. She can usually beat them both at cards and has already won enough stogies to last her for months. In the evenings they take turns telling their bullshit stories and all of hers are about people they’ve never met. They feel like stories from another life.

She’s no longer taken aback to find herself ordering her pilots around. She knows what form she’ll need to fill out for almost any contingency. She’s turning into another person and it’s almost a relief, it’s better than missing Starbuck all the damn time. She figures of all the things all the people of the Colonies have lost, feeling like herself isn’t such a big thing to give up.

_“That’s just it, Kara,” he says, meeting her eyes finally and she almost wishes he’d go back to staring through the rack above his because she sees the depth of his despair a split second before he tells her, “I didn’t want to make it back alive.” She wants to deny it, to say it’s just post-traumatic whateverthefrak, but that’s just a knee-jerk defense mechanism. The truth of it is literally staring her in the face and all she can do is stare back and she can’t tell if she’s drowning in her pain or his._

She’s just out of a meeting with the Admiral when she runs bodily into Lee, going around a corner on C Deck. They stare at one another for a second. It feels like she hasn’t seen him in years and it feels like that conversation in the bunkroom was yesterday and she remembers that she wants to hit him but what she really wants is for him not to walk away.

“Ah, I was just going to lunch,” he says. “If you’re free…?”

It’s not what she wants from him, she has no idea what they’re going to talk about, but she shrugs and turns to follow him.

_“Lee…” she begins. She wishes she knew what he wanted from her. Her response to his admission is so viscerally selfish – you can’t leave me – that she can’t tell if she wants to talk him out of this for his sake or hers. All the reasons she can come up with for why he should live are about her or his father or the fleet needing him and she isn’t willing to guilt him into living. She tries to figure out what keeps her going, but she can’t come up with anything that would sound right out loud._

She prods at a lump of vegetable material with her fork and if she was still Starbuck she’d make a joke about the food on _Pegasus_ , but she isn’t, and she has no idea when she’ll see him again when no one’s about to die, so she says, “We used to be friends. What happened to that?”

He looks away. “I’m sorry,” he tells his reconstituted potatoes.

“That’s not an answer,” she points out, running her index finger along the still-familiar scratches in the metal tabletop.

“I miss you,” he says, looking up, those too-blue eyes pained but clear.

Which also isn’t an answer, and she wonders if there’s ever going to be anything the two of them can’t talk around, but this time she just says, “So what’re you gonna do about it?”

_“How can I help?” she asks at last, hating her helplessness, hating how the world keeps ending time after time and she never frakking gets used to it._

He takes her calls after that, at least.

“So, Dee’s pretty,” she says one evening, after they’ve cleared up the scheduling conflict that was the pretext of the day.

“Yeah,” he agrees in a pleased-yet-surprised voice that tells her it’s all still new to him.

She can’t quite think of what to say next, but she’s sick of adding to the list of things they can’t talk about, so she shifts her grip on the receiver and presses on. “Well, I think it’s great,” she tells him, hoping her voice sounds more certain about it than she feels.

There’s a pause before he says, “Me too,” and she tries not to read anything into that.

_“I don’t know,” he admits, eyes bright and hollow. “Just… be you,” he says, and she wants to laugh because she doesn’t know how to be herself when he’s not being himself, she has no frakking idea what Starbuck would do in this situation. But Kara thinks maybe he was also saying ‘be here,’ so she crawls into the rack with him, boots and all, and curls against his side, where they can feel each other breathing._

There’s a hollowness in his eyes again when she sees him next, across the Rec Room when Helo persuades her to spend a rare off-shift on _Galactica_ , but his arm is slung around Dee’s shoulders and the sight of him is almost as strange as it was the day the worlds ended, down in the brig. He isn’t supposed to be her problem anymore, though, she has to remember that his life is separate from hers now, and anyway it’s not like she could fix him the last time. She spares a moment to hope that Dee sees it, that she’s taking care of him, before sliding into her seat at the triad table.

_“Things will get better,” she murmurs into his chest, because it’s what she thinks you’re supposed to say, but it’s so embarrassingly trite that she isn’t surprised at his huff of bitter laughter. She pokes his stomach. “I’m not very good at this, ok?” she says defensively. The next chuckle is a little less bitter, and his hand rises to stroke up and down her back. The moment stretches, and she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do next. She just knows she can’t leave him alone. She hopes he feels that way too._

She nails the Raider that was stuck on his six and whoops as her bird swoops through the fireball, the blood is hot and fast in her veins and this is what it’s supposed to be like, the two of them screaming and bitching until somehow a miracle flies out of their collective ass, this feeling of giddy invincibility, the two of them against a sky full of death, together, part of something no one else has. But even as she swings her Viper around to engage with Raider number four, the exhilaration is fraying into something darker. It’s been frakking weeks since she’s felt like this and it isn’t going to last, in another minute the fight will be over and she’ll be heading back to her ship and he to his and when she climbs out of her plane Melissa will shriek a little and grab her shoulders and she’ll keep a grin plastered on her face until –

 _Frak!_ Her bird jerks as a shot hits home and her starboard engine gutters perilously and she didn’t even _see_ it, frakking lapse of concentration and you _never_ take your head out of the game, you _never_ worry about afterwards or there won’t be an afterwards to worry about and as she fights for control of the plane a traitorous voice in the back of her head wonders if that would be so bad, to not have to worry anymore.

The Raider dives in to finish the kill and she tries to twist out of the way but the controls are sluggish, it’s like trying to steer a cow and even if she somehow escapes there’s just going to be another one, and another, and –

A starburst of shrapnel where the Raider used to be and Apollo’s crowing over the comms, “Oh yeah, that’s how you do it,” and she wants to smack the smug off of his face because can’t he see there are too many frakking Raiders and her bird won’t fly and the fleet’s already jumping, and they aren’t really _StarbuckandApollo_ anymore anyway.

“Bug out, Apollo,” she shouts at him, “I’ll follow you home,” she promises, trying to sound as if she means it.

“Frak that, I’ll follow you,” he replies, and she wonders if he _knows_ somehow, if he can see it in her flying.

“No. I _can’t_ –”

“We can do this, Kara,” he interrupts. “Number twenty-six, remember? Reason twenty-six.”

For a second she’s too busy flipping away from an oncoming missile to realize what he’s talking about, and then fury blooms where there had been only resignation. _So the frakking asshole did get that letter_ , she thinks, and growls, “How about reason forty-one – the need to kick your frakking wingman’s sorry ass from here to the Lagoon Nebula?”

“You know my ass is available to you any time, Captain,” he says in that low, smoky voice, and it’s a frakking lie but she laughs anyway, spins to take out the Raider that was trying to sneak up behind her.

She won’t be able to yell at him properly until they make it home.

**Author's Note:**

> The awesome [Fahye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fahye/pseuds/Fahye) remixed this as [A Sunny Day in Tartarus](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4239723) \- check it out!


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